Nouvelle Vague, a usual film about an unusual movement

French New Wave is a beautiful part of cinematic history. A reinvention of cinema in a lot of senses, a rebirth, an urge to use something "old" and create something "new." Well Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague, an homage to a giant of the era, Jean-Luc Godard, does none of that.

Still for film, Nouvelle Vague (2025) Streaming on Netflix

The film's greatest downfall is it's execution. The setting, concept, and characters are all quite interesting in theory, but the way they came together

was the most boring and usual way I could possibly imagine. The idea of watching Godard turn from a film critic to a film director is quite interesting; it's a change that many French New Wave directors went through.

That is what made the first 30 of 106 minutes of runtime (roughly before they started actually shooting the movie) decently interesting, though it was plagued by small quirks that annoyed me (that I will get to momentarily.) The film is a little bit funny, it has a nice and fun vibe going on, introducing the main focus, Jean-Luc Godard as he transitions. There is one reoccurring bit I really like where Godard is trying to get into places and they keep telling him "no you aren't allowed to be here, you are the newpaper" and he has to convince them he is actually a director now not a journalist (this ends on him getting bailed out by someone because no one believes him.) Beyond this, the story kinda wandered from scene to scene of what is very obviously stories told in interviews due to how they only lingered at the surface and went no deeper.

Now onto my beef with the film; each scene started with static headshots of each character staring down the barrel of the camera with their name captioned at the bottom. For scenes that introduce many new characters, this segment can last up to 30 seconds, which doesn't seem like a lot but it becomes immediately obsolete when the characters get introduced to each other in-scene. It is simply redundant! The middle hour of the film, mostly dedicated to the making of Breathless, takes place more in the space between making the film, where all the characters talk about is how they aren't making the film, or how they do not understand what is happening. That is akin to reality, Godard's method for shooting Breathless was considered unorthodox, but it also makes for a greatly uninteresting film, especially considering they neglected to cover the editing process, which could have made up for the fact that 75% of the film is people complaining about how the film is going to suck. We in the present know it wont suck, but them in the past think it will, so how do you reconcile these two points? The film doesn't, we get one scene in the editing room then it basically cuts to the screening, a scene which mirrors the opening which I personally find to not fit with the themes but that is a personal preference.

Frankly I think it would be better worth your time to just watch Breathless, or maybe watch this one and form your own opinion. For me, it does not feel like a love letter to cinema, I find Om Shanti Om or Fabelmans much more compelling.